"A painting is not reality," declared the Les Nabis Manifesto of 1892. That was published in Paris way back when any group of like-minded artists, maybe a half dozen or so, could band together and proclaim themselves a 'movement.' Most were soon forgotten; this group succeeded. The Nabis staked out a patch of modern art landscape and lived up to their audacious name taken from the Hebrew word for 'the prophets.' I listen carefully to the likes of Pierre Bonnard, Felix Valloton, and Edouard Vuillard. They showed the stuffy turn-of-the-century art world that it was o.k. for a painting to be purely decorative, and for art to be an intimate part of daily life. They even adopted a position that artists had a moral responsibility to create 'a world apart' for these purposes. That can be a real challenge for a camera. At normal distances, the glass eye sees every detail, inescapable reality. But, when I put my eye close to the ground, there's a piece of gravel leaning against a quarter inch wide red-eyed bluet while other gravels and bluets just stand around wondering what to do about the worlds apart from theirs. (Maybe we're not so far apart.)

Recently, at a joyous public celebration my old friend Dr. Dean Dog declared to the assembled less-than-multitude that ours was a remarkable 45-year friendship between one with a heuristic mind (he) and another with an algorithmic mind (me). After a period of recursive Fibonacci reflection on the synaptic pathways required, I developed this neurological map of the generic heuristic mind. Note, the connections go every which away.

We extend a challenge to my old friend Slim the H-Man, acknowledged expert on the native plants of Georgia, to identify this flowering shrub. There were no leaves when this shot was taken. Genus and species, please.

It's overcast and peaceful here in the Cove this morning. Thousands of Bloodroot flowers closed their shutters and snugged their blankets last night against a sharp chill. They never like to get up early anyway, at least until it warms some, and even then they act like they're waiting around for some Starbucks. Which I would gladly bring if they'd open while I'm here to watch. Meanwhile, a little snooze will work for me.

Lately, I've been intently studying fossilized teeth from Amphipithecus a now extinct primate from about 35 million years ago. Some have upper molars with hypercones, others are missing their hypercones. Some have fused mandibles, others are notably unfused. Nonetheless, I had hoped to discover by pure deductive reasoning, including persuasive discrimination between deliberate tooth marks and biomorphic artifacts, the source of this almost ornamental flaking in the picture. Each flake has been precisely located on a high resolution digital grid. This digi-causal map will be submitted to rigorous statistical analysis to determine the overall coefficient of randomness which, if indicative of rational influences, could be the basis for a paper I'll submit to the Journal of Molarity and Cuspiditis.